Adobe Photoshop and Eighteenth-Century Manuscripts: A New
Approach to Digital Paleography

Abstract

While research coordinator at the Burney Centre at McGill University in Montreal,
I pioneered new digital paleographical methods to support the editorial work on
Frances Burney and Samuel Richardson undertaken there. Prior to my
interventions, the primary method for reading faint, obscured, and obliterated
manuscript texts had been multi-spectral imaging, which is prohibitively
expensive, limiting its utility as a general research tool, although it is still
sometimes in use. There have not been many alternative digital paleographical
methodologies. The potential of image manipulation software, such as Adobe
Photoshop, has been noted by a few scholars, but not explored. Working in Adobe
Photoshop, I have developed a method of deciphering heavily deleted or
obliterated text through the use of layering techniques, altered color levels,
and the employment of certain kinds of filters. The method is more advanced than
simple image enlargement techniques used by most researchers. Importantly
though, it remains far less expensive than multi-spectral imaging. The technique
contributed to the recovery of nearly all of the obliterated text in the first
two volumes of The Court Journals and Letters of Frances
Burney, which were published by Oxford University Press in 2011, and
it was also used within in-progress volumes from The
Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson. This article
discusses the methodology and some of its key results from eighteenth-century
manuscripts.

Up to this point, the primary method for reading faint, obscured, and obliterated
manuscript texts has been multi-spectral imaging, first described in A. H. Smith’s
"The Photography of Manuscripts" (1938). For the past
75 years, multi-spectral imaging has served as the predominant methodology for
deciphering hard-to-read manuscripts; its continuing usefulness as a paleographical
tool has been the subject of recent studies [Chabries, Booras, and Bearman 2003] and [Goltz et al. 2007]. The Chester F. Carlson Center for Imaging Science at the
Rochester Institute of Technology contains a division devoted to cultural artifact
and document imaging; their projects have required multi-spectral technology to
recover material from the Archimedes Palimpsest and other historical texts.[1]
Yet the instruments required for multi-spectral imaging – multi-spectral cameras,
color filters, and digital storage for super high-resolution images – are
prohibitively expensive,[2] which limit its utility as a general research
tool. There have not been many alternative digital paleographical methodologies.
Carl W. Griffin’s survey of the field, "Digital Imaging: Looking
Toward the Future of Manuscript Research" (2006), gestures towards the
usefulness of image manipulation software, such as Adobe Photoshop, but does not
describe any particular methods.[3] There are a few current projects, predominantly in the field of
medieval research, that have yielded results. Cultural Heritage Imaging (CHI), a
nonprofit corporation, has developed and distributed digital imaging and
preservation solutions, most of which relate to its innovative computational
photographic method called "Reflectance Transformation
Imaging." This method captures the shape and color of a subject, allowing
the user to adjust lighting directionality to reveal surface information. Through
this technique, CHI has successfully recovered previously unreadable sections of
illuminated manuscripts by adjusting levels and using multiple images to piece
together partial or damaged material with a program called GIMP (GNU Image
Manipulation Program).[4] Peter Ainsworth and
Michael Meredith have also developed an electronic tool called "Virtual Vellum" that enables users to view, transcribe, and manipulate
electronic versions of manuscripts [Ainsworth and Meredith 2009]. Beyond its
pedagogical and expository applications, the aim of "Virtual
Vellum" is to grant open access to these manuscripts to researchers who
would not otherwise be able to view them. The digital methodologies I have developed
serve similar functions to CHI’s "Reflectance Transformation
Imaging" and "Virtual Vellum," though mine
have particular applications for the recovery of deleted and hard-to-read text.

Ultraviolet lighting is also a viable and cost-effective option for recovering
deleted text. New 35mm cameras cost at least $150, while UV camera filters can be
found for around $10. This is comparable in cost to Adobe Photoshop: an educational
subscription to Adobe’s Creative Cloud (which contains Photoshop) will run slightly
less than $200. However, many universities offer the software for free on
specialized library computers, and users can attain most of the functionality of
Photoshop through the open-source GNU Image Manipulation Program. There are a couple
of drawbacks to ultraviolet lighting: 1) Some archive-rich libraries, such as the
New York Public Library and the British Library, neither allow users to take
pictures with their own cameras (and a UV filter) nor are willing to supply these
services themselves (though ordinary scanned images are available). 2) Ultraviolet
light is not always the better solution. The following picture sequence (Figures
1-3) compares the results of ultraviolet light with my methodologies. Figure 1 displays the original obliterated image, which
is a passage from Frances Burney’s French journal held at the McGill University Rare
Books Department.

Figure 1.

Figure 2 shows the effects of an ultraviolet
backlight, which definitely improves the readability, but the results of my
methodology in Figure 3 confirm the difficult-to-read
first word of the second line, "d’entendre".
The passage then becomes, "J’ai bien peux imaginé en
demandeur d’entendre cette tragedie comment…"
[Burney n.d. 1], [5] which opens her description of a tragedy and
its reception.

Figure 2.

Figure 3.

My current research methodologies and approaches stem from my five years
serving as a research assistant and later as the research coordinator of the Burney
Centre at McGill University in Montreal. The Burney Centre contains the world’s
largest holdings of material relating to the family of the major eighteenth-century
novelist and diarist Frances Burney, which unites microfilm, photocopies, and
scans of the major Burney collections at the Berg Collection in the New York Public
Library, the British Library in London, and the Beinecke Library at Yale University,
as well as important smaller and private holdings. The main goal of the Burney
Centre is to prepare modern, complete, and unabridged scholarly editions of the
journals and letters of Frances Burney and her father Charles Burney, author of the
first history of music. More recently, the Centre has expanded its focus beyond the
Burney family to include editions of other major eighteenth-century novelists. The
Centre is a key site for the Cambridge Edition of the Works of Samuel Richardson
project, with twenty-five projected volumes. Editions of Jane Austen’s juvenilia and
manuscript writings with Cambridge University Press and Broadview Press (Canada)
have also recently appeared through the Centre.

While at the Burney Centre, I developed a method that combines layering techniques,
color levels, and filters and has proved highly effective for my research work on
The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney
(Oxford University Press), The Additional Journals and Letters
of Frances Burney (Oxford University Press), and the Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Samuel Richardson. The method is more advanced than simple image
enlargement techniques used by most researchers. Importantly though, it remains far
less expensive than multi-spectral imaging. First, it requires changing the color
levels of a high-resolution photograph or scan in order to emphasize the contrast
between obliteration marks and original text. The next steps involve adding new
layers and carefully removing obliteration marks until the original text becomes
visible by using a paint brush tool that is set to the background color. This method
can also be used in conjunction with various filters that may sharpen or clarify
some aspects of the image. I’ve illustrated the method in a corresponding series of
images [Figures 4-16], which demonstrate the
step-by-step process of recovering a word. Not all of the steps are obligatory, but
the results are often improved after adjusting the Brightness/Contrast or Levels in
the image [Figures 5-6] and using and often
customizing the Sharpen filter [Figures 7-9]. Next, it
is important to add a layer [Figure 10] to separate
the researcher’s work from the original image, which allows for easy recovery of the
original if a mistake is made during the process. The following steps are largely
iterative, which involve using the paint tool to remove obliteration marks that are
not definitively part of the original text [Figures
11-15]. Finally, the Brightness/Contrast or Levels can be adjusted once
again [Figure 16] to make the recovery work blend into
the original background.

The technique contributed to the recovery of nearly all of the obliterated text in
the first two volumes of The Court Journals and Letters of
Frances Burney, which were published by Oxford University Press in 2011.
Unlike multi-spectral imaging, the use of image manipulation software is very
cost-effective and thus applications in other textual projects, not just those
related to the eighteenth century, are potentially wide-ranging.

I am currently using these methodologies for a project that focuses on the creative
process of composition and the interactions between manuscript and print in the
eighteenth century. The work on Frances Burney’s manuscripts that I have already
undertaken at the Burney Centre in Montreal will provide the foundation for this
project, which will employ and further develop my digital paleographical methodology
using a new set of eighteenth-century manuscripts and will assess and analyze the
insights it offers. The rest of this piece will demonstrate four applications of
this method to important eighteenth-century manuscripts and discuss its potential
for general use.

One of the earliest published examples of this technique appears in volume 1 of
The Court Journals and Letters of Frances Burney
(2011). This volume, which spans July-December 1786, depicts the beginning of
Frances Burney’s tenure as Keeper of the Robes at the court of Queen Charlotte.
Burney frequently crossed out passages in her journals, especially those that she
later deemed were too private for potential public consumption. The top image in
Figure 17 is a typical obliterated passage from
Burney’s court years; the bottom image contains the same passage, but it has been
modified using my digital paleography methodologies. In the altered image, we can
detect the opening words "The mourning." The next word "will" is more
difficult, though the two l’s at the end make it possible to read. "3 weeks" is
clear as is "I believe." The beginning of the second line is the most obscured:
I determined that the first mark was a false start and read this as "we were."
"already at Kew" is fairly legible, and so is the final part, "before the
Princess Amelia died," except perhaps for the last letters of "before,"
though these can be safely guessed. When put together, the text reads, "The
mourning will be but 3 weeks, I believe. We were already at Kew before the
Princess Amelia died." It is a significant passage, which reveals Burney’s
response to the death of Princess Amelia, the second daughter of George II, on 31
October 1786 [Sabor 2011, 250].

Figure 17.

This is only one of several important recovered passages from Burney’s
court journals. Some of the deleted material recovered using this technique
confirmed Burney’s long-lasting depression from fall 1786, a medical condition
suspected by her biographers, but never before confirmed in her correspondence.

This methodology has also been useful when applied to Burney’s novel manuscripts.
There are surviving early manuscript drafts and later versions, including a proof
copy, an interleaved copy, and some significant post-publication revisions, for her
four novels, Evelina (1778), Cecilia (1782), Camilla (1796), and The Wanderer (1814). Eighteenth-century scholars have
rarely been able to analyze fictional manuscripts because few novel manuscripts from
the eighteenth-century survive as Burney’s do: it was common practice for printing
houses to divide and destroy manuscripts during the publishing process. Extant
manuscripts sometimes contain important authorial or editorial additions, pasted or
sewn onto manuscript pages. This methodology can contribute to our understanding of
Burney’s creative process of composition. In the early draft fragments that survive
from her third novel Camilla, Burney changes the names
of some of the characters. Burney’s most fascinating alteration can be seen in Figure 18, where "Mr. Solmes" is discovered to be
a gender-bending replacement for "Mrs. Arlbery."
"Mr. Solmes" is undoubtedly a reference to the eponymous heroine’s distasteful
and unyielding suitor in Samuel Richardson’s Clarissa
(1747-8). Initially, this name change seems like a bizarre selection for the "Mrs.
Arlbery" figure, who is playful, sarcastic, and largely good intentioned. Yet
the early version of Mrs. Arlbery tries to force Camilla into a mercenary marriage
to a nobleman so that she can pay off her debts. She even tries to prevent Camilla
from seeing her father in the last minutes before the marriage is solemnized. The
name change to "Mr. Solmes," then, is an apt choice for an advocate of a
pressured, mercenary marriage. It reveals the significance of Clarissa as an intertext for Camilla, even
though the storyline that contained Camilla’s failed aristocratic marriage was
ultimately deleted from the novel. We can also see that Burney’s name and gender
change of Mrs. Arlbery was half-hearted at best, since all of the pronouns linked to
her character in the draft were left feminine.

These digital methodologies, however, are not always successful. The primary limiting
factors are 1) poor image quality and 2) extremely heavy deletions and manuscript
deterioration. Unfortunately, researchers can rarely control either of these
factors. It is usually impossible to reconstruct text where there are holes, gaps,
and tears in the manuscript. Extremely heavy obliterations – where it is even
difficult to determine the existence of letters with ascenders ("b,"
"d,"
"h,"
"k,"
"l," and "t"), descenders ("g,"
"j,"
"p,"
"q," and "y"), or both ascenders and descenders ("f" and long
"s") – can only be deciphered with the help of multi-spectral imaging or
invasive chemical processes. Image quality can also be prohibitively low; few
librarians allow image reproduction in excess of 300 dpi [Ainsworth and Meredith 2009, 12]. It is also nearly impossible to retrieve
high resolution and color scans from most microfilm versions, which are often used
in lieu of the original manuscripts [Brown et al. 2012]. Figure 19, which is taken from the correspondence
between the eighteenth-century author Samuel Richardson and his admirer and friend
Lady Dorothy Bradshaigh, illustrates the difficulties that arise with low image
resolution and heavy deletions. The Richardson-Bradshaigh correspondence, which
began with the latter’s anonymous homage to the former’s writings, is in general
riddled with obliteration marks because their correspondence, which lasted from 1748
until Richardson’s death in 1761, was prepared for public consumption, initially
within Anna Laetitia Barbauld’s The Correspondence of Samuel
Richardson (1804).[6] Places and names, such Lady Bradshaigh’s identity and the
"low" origins of her husband’s wealth (cannel coal pits at
their estate in Haigh, Lancashire), are constantly obscured, but these can almost
always be safely guessed. There are other extended deletions in the text, and
because of the thick and heavy nature of the obliteration marks, many of these
cannot be fully or even mostly deciphered, such as the example given in Figure 19.

Figure 19.

Certain phrases like "generally speaking," which is located on line
two of the obliteration, can be recovered with some careful work. Most of the
passage, however, is undecipherable, which is also due to poor image quality. Even
though Figure 19 has a resolution of 350 dpi, the
dimensions for each .pdf file from the Richardson correspondence, which contains two
sheets, is 8.263 inches by 11.694 inches (33.9 MB). This is in marked contrast to
some of the other files, such as Figures 4-16, which
originated as .tiff files with a resolution of 300 dpi and dimensions of 18.28
inches by 21.313 inches (100.3 MB). The Burney sheets are nearly six times larger
than the Richardson ones – 33.9 MB for two sheets of the Richardson vs. 100.3 MB for
one sheet of the Burney – which accounts for the large discrepancy in image quality,
and hence decipherability, between the two.

Above all, these digital methods have the potential to shape paleographical work
beyond Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson, and the Burney Centre. I will close with a
discussion of a poem by Lady Mary Wortley Montagu, an eighteenth-century author
known primarily for her Turkish Embassy Letters
(written 1716-18), which contain invaluable descriptions of eastern culture in the
early eighteenth century. Lady Mary’s "Wednesday: The Tête à
Tête" from her Court Eclogues (1716), which
exist in manuscript form and are written in the famous poet Alexander Pope’s hand,
has a significant alternate ending.[7] At the end of "Wednesday," a pair of unidentified lovers is forced to part. The
"final" text is apparent in a digital photo of the
manuscript, though obliteration marks can be clearly discerned Figure 20:

There is a significant change in female agency between the early and the final
version. While the final version emphasizes the male lover’s
"curses" because of his "unfinish’d
Loves," the first ends with the lady’s direct speech, which emphasizes
her lost "joys." Montagu’s removal of the female
lover’s sexual agency before publication reveals the extent to which stringent
eighteenth-century cultural norms may have influenced her creative process of
composition.

These four examples from manuscripts by Frances Burney, Samuel Richardson, and Lady
Wortley Montagu illustrate that this project could be of great interest to
eighteenth-century manuscript and textual scholars, as it uses digital methodologies
to elucidate manuscripts for editing projects, thus making such projects more
accessible than ever before. Moreover, these techniques need not be limited to
eighteenth-century manuscripts: as long as the images are presented in
high-resolution and as long as the obliterations are neither too thick nor too
heavy, the techniques have potentially wide applications. They provide, above all, a
means of interacting with manuscripts through methodologies that, instead of
opposing, incorporate the rise of digital texts and technologies.

Acknowledgements

I would like to thank my former colleagues at McGill University’s Burney Centre,
especially Peter Sabor and Stewart Cooke, for their assistance in the
development and implementation of these techniques. Matthew Grenby and Tom Mole
also provided valuable support in the articulation of this project. I am
grateful to the librarians and libraries that have provided the manuscripts that
are the focus of this article, including those at the Beinecke Library, British
Library, Victoria and Albert Museum, Lyndsi Barnes and Isaac Gewirtz at the New
York Public Library, and Ann Marie Holland and Jennifer Garland at McGill
Library’s Rare Books department.

Notes

[2] The minimum amount for a customized multi-spectral
imaging system for medical imaging use (which could theoretically also be
applied to manuscripts) is $25,000, though many cost at least $50,000 [Coffey 2012].

[4]GIMP is an open source application which can do almost
everything Adobe Photoshop does. See
http://culturalheritageimaging.org/. The methodologies I have
developed can be adapted for use on GIMP and other types of image manipulation
software that offer a full range of functionality.

[5] This is not grammatically correct French, which
should not be surprising since the point of Burney’s French notebooks is to
teach herself, under the guidance of her francophone husband, how to improve her
French. A corrected version of this phrase should read, "J’ai bien pu imaginé un demandeur d’entendre cette
tragédie…"

[6] Most of the Richardson-Bradshaigh
correspondence is held in the Forster Collection [Richardson 1754].

[7] I am grateful to Cassie Childs, who is
working on an article-length study of this poem called "Managing Poetic Space and Complicating Women’s Erotic Voices in Lady Mary
Wortley Montagu’s 'Wednesday: The Tête à
Tête,'" for bringing this to my attention [Montagu n.d.].

[8]Manuscript symbols used here correspond with those used in modern editions of
eighteenth-century journals and letters. <
> indicate uncertain readings. <xxxxx 4-6
words> indicates material that has been crossed-out and not
recovered, in this instance, 4-6 words. [Montagu 1993], 192 n.
provides an earlier tentative reading of the final lines:

Sabor n.d. Sabor, Peter, ed. "Samuel Richardson’s Correspondence with Lady Bradshaigh and Lady
Echlin." Vols. 6 and 7 of The Cambridge Edition
of the Works of Samuel Richardson. Cambridge: Cambridge University
Press, in progress.